Image intensifiers are widely used in night vision applications and often employ a television front end. The resulting output may be viewed directly by a user or may be processed by various computer techniques to provide image enhancement.
A significant difficulty has been encountered in the use of image intensifiers and has severely limited their applicability both for direct viewing and for downstream image enhancement. This difficulty involves the random appearance of small, short-lived bright areas in a series of images, known as spikes. The occurrence of such spikes greatly detracts from the overall image quality, particularly in images with a low background light level of the type often encountered in night vision. As a result of the random occurrence of such spikes, the effectiveness of downstream image enhancement processing is limited. It would be desirable to provide a correction method which would render the images as clean as those recorded during the daytime.